My Mobile Adventures *~*~* – Top 20 Posts of 2009
© Copyright 2008 Tink *~*~*
http://MyMobileAdventures.com
Now that 2010 is almost upon us, it’s time to do a 2009 “Best Of” post. I get a kick out of “fun facts”, so this year I’m taking a statistical point of view. Let’s see what 2009 held!
My Mobile Adventures *~*~* Top 20 Posts of 2009
Posts are ranked according to how many visits they received during the 12-month period ranging from 12/29/2008 – 12/29/2009. Data gathered and presented by the WordPress Stats plugin.
- Lego Sculpture at Downtown Disney: The Dragon
- Colorful birds from Orlando, Florida
- Disney’s Ladies in RED
- My Top 5 FUNky Facts About Pelicans
- “The Rocks”, Sanibel Island
- More Disney Characters in RED
- 7 Things To Do In Walt Disney World On Halloween (except THAT!)
- “There once was a man from Nantucket…”
- Yet More Disney Characters Who Wear RED
- My “favorite” Disney red-head
- A Disney Dance of the Hours
- Of Mice and Mutts
- Lighthouse at Disney’s Yacht Club Resort
- The Empress Lilly, Downtown Disney
- Critters on the Castle: Kaa
- Sanibel Island beach birds
- Frog metamorphosis at Disney
- About
- Dancing mushrooms from Disney’s Fantasia
- Mickey Mouse Chillaxin’ In Paradise
IN WITH THE OLD
Among my Top 20 Posts of 2009 are four posts which were originally published during 2008.
- 100% of these posts contain Disney-related content
- 50% of these posts were created for the Ruby Tuesday meme, and deal with the topic of Disney characters who wear the color red.
- Dark horse: my “About” page somehow squeaked into the Top 20. Who knew, huh?
SPEAKING OF MEMES…
- The Ruby Tuesday meme, created and managed by Mary The Teach, is responsible for prompting 35% of my Top 20 posts. The runners up are:
- Camera Critters (Saturdays, 23%)
- The Wednesday Trifecta (22%)
- The Monday Trifecta at 9%
– of the three memes in which I’ve participated in on Wednesdays, Site Meter indicates that it is Outdoor Wednesday, created and managed by Susan @ A Southern Daydreamer, that brings the most visitors.
– Well, it’s actually a bi-fecta now, one of the memes having fallen prey to blogger burnout. None of them stands out as bringing in more traffic than the others.
THE MORAL OF THE STORY: since I’ve been cutting back on meme participation – it was starting to feel like a “gotta” instead of a “wanna” – I should probably concentrate on my Tuesday, Wednesday and Saturday memes, if I want to maintain decent levels of traffic.
SPEAKING OF SITE METER…
Lots of interesting information about your audience and how they get to your blog each day can be had from Site Meter.
- Even though I do get a lot of traffic from the photo meme sites themselves, the vast majority of my traffic comes from Google searches. The memes just seem to provide an excellent prompt for what people are searching for.
- I seem to have hit the nail on the head with several of my post titles in the Top 20. There are many, MANY searches for phrases like “facts about pelicans” and “Disney red characters”.
- I get a chuckle every time I see that someone has searched on “there once was a man from Nantucket…”
- Site Meter tells me that I get a lot more visits on the days I mobile blog than I do when I create meme-related posts that are not mobile blogged. This is especially true when I mobile blog from Disney. Visits on mobile blogging days tend to be from fewer unique visitors, yet those unique visitors show up multiple times throughout the day to check for updates. Each post has fewer visitors but collectively they add up for the day to be many more visits than on a regular blogging day.
THE MORAL OF THE STORY: Services such as Site Meter can provide valuable insight into who your audience is, where they come from, why they’re visiting and why they return. Add to this a little intelligent SEO in post titles and repeat traffic ensues.
EFFORT COUNTS… sort of!
It was a difficult year in my day job. I was thrust into something completely new and different and it was a tough row to hoe, for a while there. As the year wore on, my job became more and more carnivorous, devouring my life.
Here we can see that as the year wore on, less and less posts were making it into the Top 20 for the year. 40% of the Top 20 were posted in the first quarter of the year; 30% in the 2nd quarter and 10% in the 3rd quarter. The 4th quarter is not represented at all.There are a couple of reasons for this:
- That’s the way it goes when you’re in corporate finance; the last quarter of the fiscal year is challenging and doesn’t leave much time or frankly energy for other endeavors.
- But to be fair, the posts from the previous quarters and even the previous year have been hanging around longer and had a longer time to rack up search engine traffic.
- Had I been able to put more effort into blogging as the year wore on – posting every day, visiting other blogs – I might have been able to do better, but realistically, this sort of measurement over a finite period of time renders more recent posts chronologically challenged.
Now here’s something weird. Despite the traffic appearing to slow down, the number of subscribers I have has been steadily increasing all year. Take a look at these numbers from Feedburner -
Despite not having the personal bandwidth necessary to visit other bloggers as much as I’d like to, I was still able to do a few things to gain exposure:
- TweetMeme – I put the retweet button on my posts, and occasionally, someone actually pushes it!
- TwitterFeed – I signed up for this and now every post I make is automatically tweeted
- PicATheme – “elite” group of photobloggers/meme participants who posted to a group blog (group has since folded). While I was contributing there, I noticed some visitors who followed my link from there
- WaltDisneyBoards.com – my feed automatically posts there to my very own forum. I get exposure, the owner gets Disney-related content. The fact that it is a forum means I can have conversations with the folks there; a busy thread will draw more and more people in, to see what the buzz is about, and many of them end up clicking through to the blog. If you are a Disney fan, I strongly suggest you check the place out. You will find a nice bunch of folks there to chat with about your favorite obsession.
- Facebook – My Mobile Adventures *~*~* launched a fan page at the beginning of August. At this time, I’m not auto-posting there but I want to do that in the future. So far, I have about 70 fans; I have to assume there is some cross-over from my subscriber base, but a lot of them are real life friends and relatives who were not really aware that I blogged until I created the fan page and sent them an invite. So I gained a few subscribers there as well.
MORAL OF THE STORY: Distribute your feed and mention your URL via multiple means. It all adds up to more exposure, more requests for the feed – more subscribers!
CONCLUSION
These are very modest numbers I’ve been describing. Had I not a day job, I would have the time and the energy to devote to creating more valuable content and publicizing the blog more widely, including those all-important fellow blogger connections. However, modest or not, I think the numbers show that taking action makes a positive impact.
- There are many venues in which to take such actions – Twitter, Facebook, forums are all good places to promote what you’ve got to offer.
- Use metrics tools like Site Meter and a stats plugin to observe and measure – what’s working, what’s not working, what’s standing still. The numbers tell a story!
- Use SEO techniques to attract search engine traffic – name your photos and construct your post titles with SEO in mind.
Even a blog that is “just for fun” can enjoy some success and steady improvement when a few simple actions are taken. I’m looking forward to more of the same in 2010, and I’m also looking forward to hearing about YOUR blogging insights.
Happy New Year!
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It’s The Geekend! – Are you reading this blog through Spokeo?
My Mobile Adventures *~*~* presents…
“It’s The Geekend!” Volume 1, No. 2
© Copyright 2008 Tink *~*~*
http://MyMobileAdventures.blogspot.com
Are You Reading This Blog Through SPOKEO?
Hello, mah peeps. FeedBurner is telling me I have 39 subscribers, and that 14 of you are reading via Spokeo.
If you are one of the Spokeo readers, can you raise your hand please? I’d like to follow you back, but Spokeo doesn’t seem to have a feature that allows me to see who has my blog listed under “Friends”.
So… if you are one of the Spokeo subscribers, please leave a comment or email me or send up a flare or whatever! I’d like to have the opportunity to follow you back.
BTW, for those who never heard of Spokeo – it’s a social media aggregator. Suppose one of your friends has a blog AND they’re on Twitter, AND they post photos to Flickr, AND they post videos on YouTube, etc. With an aggregator you don’t have to go to four different places to read their stuff. You just go to the aggregator, and there it all is. There are other aggregators out there besides Spokeo. I have an account with Spokeo, but I also like FriendFeed, especially since there is an iGoogle widget available for FriendFeed. I just put it on my iGoogle home page and I can see at a glance who is posting what. If the source that you want to read has an RSS feed, you can always use Google Reader, too. I have also messed around a little with Feedly, which is a Firefox add-on. And speaking of Firefox add-ons….
ScribeFire Update
A few weeks back, I wrote about ScribeFire, a blogging tool that is actually a Firefox add-on and very convenient to use. Overall, I really like it; however, I did mention in that article that I was having some issues uploading photos. The next release of the Firefox add-on seems to have fixed those particular issues; however, several readers have told me this week that they are unable to see my photos. It doesn’t happen to all of my readers, and it doesn’t happen all the time, but the one condition that seems to be consistent among people cannot see my photos is that the photos in question were uploaded using ScribeFire. If I replace them with something I uploaded from the Blogger interface or with something that is hosted elsewhere, we are fine.
Regrettably, I will probably discontinue the use of ScribeFire for my blogging tool needs. I am pretty much all about the photos on this blog, so anything that might be interfering with your viewing pleasure is of some concern to me. If I find out that it’s NOT ScribeFire, I’ll happily use it again. As I type this, I see that Blogger is threatening a “scheduled outage” at 4:00 PM PDT (in 20 minutes, yikes, better finish!) – so maybe, just maybe it’s a Blogger problem and they’re going to fix it tonight.
I’ve thought about trying to find another blogging tool to use, but there’s going to be a major event coming soon that might make that unnecessary….
This Blog Will Be Moving Soon!
Date to be determined! For months now, my friend and website guru Annie of Pixel Currents has been working on and off on setting up a new home for My Mobile Adventures *~*~* self-hosted using WordPress. I like Blogger, but I’ve got a lot of space over at the hosting site where TinkRBell is located. That’s my pre-blog trip report site – lots of Sanibel and Disney trip reports and photos live there, from before I moved to Florida. I want to make use of all the space and bandwidth I have there, and have a photo gallery as well.
We’ve had TinkRBell shut down for a while now, redirecting everyone to here at the blog while we tried to figure some things out and messed around in the boiler room some. One of the things that stopped us from getting on with it and launching the new site was figuring out how to make Word Press do the “mobile” part. We messed with Utterz, but the photos were teeny tiny when we initially messed with it, so the idea was abandoned. I have, however, used Utterz here at the Blogger blog to send audio and video from my phone, and it works swell for those purposes. You can even mash them together if you time it right – audio, text, photo, video, combined into a single post.
I really kind of enjoyed the time I was at Disney and sort of having a conversation with Snowbird and Mare in real time. I would send a mobile post to the blog, they would comment, the comments would come to my phone via SMS text, I would call Utterz and leave an audio response which got forwarded to the blog, they would comment some more… it was really fun! And I want to get into more of that sort of interaction while I’m out and about mobile blogging.
Anyhow, fast forward a few months and we became aware of a mobile blogging plug-in for WordPress that looked really promising, but I didn’t have the right phone for it. Honestly, I was getting peeved by my carrier’s inability to give me bars out on the islands anyway, so I was ripe to switch services, but the WordPress plug-in situation kind of sent me over the edge, and that is how the Crackberry came about.
Alas, we found the WordPress plug-in to be buggy and uncooperative. And then came the day when Utterz decided to offer larger photo sizes – yay! We did some testing and voila, we were in business!
So now we are all excited, knocking out walls, picking out new drapes and carpeting, doing some decorating, and all that kind of thing. We are getting pretty close to the point where we can re-launch TinkRBell and the new blog. I’ll be sure to start bellowing about it often and early, and I’m hoping that not too many of you, my precious subscribers, gets lost!
OK, I think that’s enough geekishness for one post. Long post! Have a great GEEKEND! TTYL
